Mozilla Releases New Firefox Version Without Australis

It's still a nightly version, but it should be merged into the Aurora branch

Firefox logo

Mozilla has announced the release of a new development branch for the nightly version that doesn’t feature the dreaded Australis interface.

Mozilla has announced a while ago that it was planning to change the appearance of its Firefox Internet browser, using a new theme called Australis. All well and good, but the community hasn't reacted favorably and even accused Mozilla that it was making the browser too similar to Google Chrome.

Australis is already a part of Mozilla Thunderbird, and you can always check the latest version of that RSS and email client to see how it looks.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Mozilla also released a new development branch, 28.x, which includes the Australis theme. Everyone using the nightly version of Firefox would have been forced to adopt it, even if they didn't want it.

Now, a Mozilla developer has announced the release of a new branch called Holly, with the same version number, which is the normal Firefox without Australis.

“Holly is the version of Nightly that doesn’t include the Australis changes. We are running this special ‘backout’ branch of Nightly because Australis won’t be ready to make the move to Firefox Aurora by the December 9th merge date.”

“We will continue to work on Australis in the Nightly 29 train, with the goal of Australis merging to Firefox Aurora 29. In the meantime, the Holly branch is what will be merged to Firefox Aurora 28,” said Jared Wein, M.Sc. and Senior Software Engineer at Mozilla on the Firefox team.

This is very good news for the people who are still clinging to the way Firefox looks and feels today, but you have to keep in mind that Australis is happening and this is just a temporary solution.